As migration control has surfaced as a barometer of national sovereignty in public debate, recent migration scholarship has rejected “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) that sees migration as a one-directional phenomenon limited by the boundaries of the nation-state. Analyses of arrival infrastructure (Meeus et al. 2019) and migrants’ social networks adopt a transnational perspective in which migrants’ places of arrival are understood as nodes in networks of personal, economic, and political connections extending beyond singular scales of analysis (city, region, nation-state).
Most migration literature invisibilizes queer refugees, though. For this population, discrimination within communities of origin can make accessing social networks dangerous. Many queer refugees have cut social, financial, and legal ties which comprise other migrants’ transnational networks. They make migration decisions that are intended to be one-directional based on understandings of which cities and countries offer LGBTQ+ legal protections. Likewise, organizations that resettle queer refugees frame their work as a one- directional transfer from a dangerous country to a safe country, maintaining the nation-state as their scale of action.
However, as immigration policies in places of arrival become stricter, queer refugees cut from transnational networks find themselves in increasingly precarious situations. In the wake of the Trump administration’s executive orders indefinitely ending refugee resettlement and targeting trans and nonbinary people, Canadian organizations that serve queer refugees have had to confront threats emanating from a country legally deemed “safe” in Canadian immigration policy. Building on Marston’s (2000) observation that new scales of analysis are constructed when “the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents” interact, Canadian organizations’ reactions to changing American politics reveals a new scale at which queer refugee solidarity is mobilizing. To apply Marston’s formulation to the current situation, the structural forces at work are both heteronormative social relations that alienate queer refugees and national migration policies that prevent them from accessing protection across the border. The practice of human agents is the work done by Canadian organizations to build solidarity networks–not between places of origin and arrival, but rather across the various spaces of arrival where queer refugees have sought protection.
Developing flexible networks across hardening borders
In cities across Canada, local queer refugee-serving organizations leverage Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program which enables members of civil society to select and resettle refugees in Canada. These organizations have long faced obstacles posed by local and national dynamics such as skyrocketing housing prices, a backlog of private sponsorship applications, and Canada’s annual cap on refugee resettlement. Now, changes to US refugee policy have forced these organizations to consider obstacles posed by international dynamics. Canada is bound to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) which establishes the US as a safe country for refugees. Asylum seekers crossing the US/Canada land border cannot claim asylum in Canada – they must file a claim in the US. Queer refugees in the US fearful of losing legal status have reached out to Canadian organizations, but the STCA precludes them from being able to seek protection in Canada.
To address this obstacle, individual organizations are acting at new scales of intervention. Local queer refugee-serving organizations have come together in national campaigns to draw attention to how tightly bound Canada’s immigration policies are to the US and to advocate for the repeal of the STCA. Toronto-based Rainbow Railroad, the largest and most professionalized of these organizations, strategically joined national organizations Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Council for Refugees, and Amnesty International Canada in 2024 to publicly call for an exception to the STCA to allow transgender, nonbinary, and intersex refugees in the US to seek asylum in Canada. These actions have drawn connections between the intimate work these organizations accomplish at the local scale and the policy debates occurring at the national scale.
Immediate changes to the STCA are unlikely, but local Canadian organizations are seeking to offer support to the people contacting them from the US. None has the capacity to offer direct support to everyone in need, and, due to the STCA, resettlement in Canada is an extremely rare solution for refugees fearing deportation from the US. Instead, developing the capacity to connect queer refugees to transit solutions, legal services, and financial support for housing and basic needs in the US cities where they are currently living has become a major objective of local organizations, in addition to offering resettlement solutions when possible.
To this end, Rainbow Railroad is launching the Queer Refugee Community Support Network in the US, Canada, France, and Germany to foster peer-to-peer support groups between new and established queer refugees in places of arrival. They hope to integrate people into an on-line social network that brings queer refugees together internationally within sub-networks for specific cities. Additionally, Rainbow Railroad offers technical and financial support to volunteer Community Support Teams who connect queer refugees in the US to cash assistance, housing, education, employment, community access, and mental and physical health services.
Most local queer refugee-serving organizations in Canada do not have the capacity to invest in international networks of care, but the example of Rainbow Railroad points to how cross-border support networks can develop arrival infrastructure across communities of arrival despite the barrier of national policy. Echoing Simone’s (2004) theory of people as infrastructure collaborating across multiple identities, director of engagement Senna Seniuk states that “this may be a time of developing resilience within our communities. Not of splintering and leaving but staying and fighting with each other… Learning resilience also happens within an international community” (personal communication, April 25, 2025). This organized transnational networking of queer refugees across countries of arrival is a new phenomenon. It is the contingent outcome of local organizations reacting to political tensions at national and international scales.
The place of US citizens in emerging transnational networks
While Trump’s executive orders have made queer people with precarious status in the US particularly vulnerable, trans and nonbinary US citizens are also increasingly worried about their safety and seeking information about moving to Canada. Rainbow Railroad received 1,777 requests for help from American citizens the day after Trump was elected, the most calls for help ever received in one day from one country. However, as Canadian organizations struggle to provide direct services to queer refugees at risk of losing legal status in the US, they cannot offer these services to US citizens. Rainbow Railroad’s Director of Protection Initiatives states, “We are… trying to support [US citizens] in all the ways we can – redirecting people to the right resources, providing information, potentially putting together legal referral lists.” Canadian organizations are focusing on directing US citizens to mutual aid networks to help people find domestic pathways to resettlement in Democratic-leaning states.
Canadian organizations are building relationships with US-based organizations such as Pink Haven Coalition, Trans Resistance Network, and Traction Pacific Northwest so that they can refer Americans looking for support in Canada to organizations better able to offer immediate help. Rainbow Railroad is also holding webinars in partnership with Egale, the Border Rights Clinic, the 519, and the Toronto law firm Green and Spiegel to equip listeners with accurate information about immigrating to Canada. The visibility of Rainbow Railroad, an organization that has gained national prominence in Canada, serves to reorient trans Americans to less visible, but more useful, services on both sides of the border. This reorientation further develops a network that extends beyond national borders and allows us to analyze queer refugee organizing as an act that connects nodes across places of arrival.
Trans US citizens are aware that Canadian organizations can offer them little in terms of direct support. According to activist Luciana Inara, “After the inauguration, we saw [Canadians] posting on Reddit offering housing to [trans people in the US] … but a lot of the momentum has died down since the election. There is a feeling of, ‘I’ve done what I can.’ Our community experiences so much need that most of the time we are limited to helping those in front of us” (personal communication, April 28, 2025). Some of the most important action happening within trans networks is information sharing across borders : where to go or avoid, how to be safe in places of potential resettlement, whom to connect with. “People underestimate how important that information is and how hard information is to find when you are a part of a small, marginalized group,” Inara added.
National borders are hardening, but queer and trans communities remain resiliently porous. There is a willingness to connect people to each other across digital and physical space, an ethos of “let me introduce you” that has always been a method of survival. In the current political context, organizations that resettle queer people in Canadian cities are working to support that ethos. Though Canadian immigration policy restricts the type of actions these organizations can take at the scale of Canadian cities, investment in new cross-border relationships may strengthen the ability of queer people to build social networks where they are.
Bibliography
- Marston, S. 2000. “The social construction of scale”, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 219–242. DOI : 10.1191/030913200674086272.
- Meeus, B., Arnaut, K. and van Heur, B. (eds.). 2019. Arrival Infrastructures : Migration and Urban Social Mobilities, London : Palgrave Macmillan.
- Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. 2002. “Methodological nationalism and beyond : nation-state-building, migration and the social sciences”, Global Networks, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 301–334. DOI : 10.1111/1471-0374.00043.
